2002/06/15

The translation of Joel on Software has 110 volunteers so far translating into 29 languages. (But isn't there anyone out there who can do Navajo?)

The first two articles have come in from the copy editors, so today I am pleased to announce the Swedish and Italian versions of Joel on Software.

I made a new CityDesk file to hold all the multilingual versions of the site. CityDesk has pretty extensive multilingual support that was designed to make it easy to support a site in multiple languages, but I've never been able to try it out until today. It took me about 2 hours to create and publish the multilingual site with the first two articles. Adding a language should take a couple of minutes (I just have to copy in a set of standard glossary for things like "Joel on Software" which translators are providing for me). Adding a newly translated article is usually as simple as cutting and pasting from the email that the copy editor sends me. So far I haven't done any languages which require right-to-left text or interesting character sets like Hindi and Cyrillic.

Have you been wondering about Distributed Version Control? It has been a huge productivity
boon for us, so I wrote Hg Init, a Mercurial tutorial—check it out!